LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

irony and the poetics of palestinian exilefallacy’, promulgated by Wimsatt and Beardsley initially in Shipley (1964) andlater elaborated into a full article which has been reprinted frequently inliterary-critical anthologies. ‘We argued’, they say in this essay, summarising theentry in Shipley, ‘that the design or intention of the author is neither availablenor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a literary work of art’(Adams 1971: 1014). New Criticism is far from being dead; it remains the mostuseful heuristic tool in the teaching of literature, especially as a healthy antidoteto the rampant subjectivism (this time involving the reader’s subjectivity ratherthan the author’s) which has found room in the post-modern space. It istherefore ‘ironic’ that New Criticism should banish the author’s intention whileat the same time focusing on irony as one of the shaping structures of literature. 7To the extent that irony is a mode, the form itself assumes the function ofironic deixis if there are no other obvious indicators. Readers who are notparticularly attuned to irony may not consider Hajjaj’s work ironic, but if weconsider it from the perspective of Frye’s theory of modes, the manner in whichthe irony works here becomes immediately obvious. Frye observes that if ‘inferiorin power or intelligence to ourselves, so that we have the sense of looking downon a scene of bondage, frustration, or absurdity, the hero belongs to the ironicmode’ (1957: 34). The death of the character in the story renders him inferior inpower, but not necessarily in intelligence, to the living author and to us asreaders. The other three elements, though, are present in Hajjaj’s fiction:bondage to the idea of the nation, frustration at not being able to achieve it, andthe absurdity of dying for it. Still following Frye’s argument, we can refine ourview of the writer’s method a bit further by seeing it as a form of tragic irony.According to Frye, the ‘central principle of tragic irony is that whateverexceptional happens to the hero should be causally out of line with hischaracter’ (1957: 41). The character in ‘A Hungry Orange’ is sketched with veryfew strokes, but we have enough information to feel some identification with hisromanticism and innocence. These are the very qualities that set him apart fromhis environment. Dying prematurely as a martyr for one’s homeland (in a smallwar, no less) is absurd, but if his first death made some sense, his second andthird certainly did not. Frye’s perceptive remarks about the significance of tragicirony are most appropriate here: ‘Irony isolates from the tragic situation thesense of arbitrariness, of the victim’s having been unlucky, selected at random orby lot, and no more deserving of what happens to him than anyone else would be.If there is a reason for choosing him for catastrophe, it is an inadequate reason,and raises more questions than it answers’ (1957: 41).If we agree that the pragmatic purpose of irony is to create a community ofsympathy, then clearly the reader must, as Hutcheon notes in the quotationgiven earlier, be able to perceive an ironic intention on the part of the authorfor that communion to take place. The intention acts as a deictic device— 39 —www.taq.ir